Throughout the process of making the portfolio, I learned more about photoshop, but also about InDesign, which I hadn’t ever used prior. I was able to figure out the different applications of the two softwares and where they differ despite their similarities. An example of this could be InDesign’s focus on individual pages in lieu of layers.
Creating thumbnails for each individual picture was fairly simple, albeit time consuming. The process itself was simple and helped me get more familiar with the keybinds and shortcuts bound in both PS and ID.
The challenging aspect of the project for me was finding feasible ways to cut down the images without losing quality or clarity. Many of the pictures I took were several megabytes due to my phone’s camera quality and needed to be sized down, some even after being saved for web.
I think I could have dedicated more time to properly cropping the pictures for a universal display, as I noticed the pictures appeared differently on varying screen resolutions and aspect ratios (e.g. My laptop vs. A library desktop)
I found the process and the instructions fairly straight forward, but felt the order of the steps was a little off-putting, as the project document mentions thumbnails and file management techniques very early on, and then again later on. I was able to get through the process once I read it over several times.
This assignment definitely allowed me to get a better understanding of the various tools used in the labs prior, but more specifically the shortcuts; They are great for timesaving and allow for a more rapid process, which I can definitely see myself applying in future projects.
Aside from the Zoom recording and the instructions, I cited earlier lab powerpoints (specifically Lab 3) for certain techniques such as the cutting of the background for one of the images.